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Desperately Seeking Celebrities

Posted June 30, 2010

Hands up! I’ll be the first to admit that I love reading celebrity interviews. It doesn’t mean I want to hang around street corners or outside clubs in the hope of bumping into my favourite star. That’s the job of the paparazzi, right? Not any more.

OK! magazine has launched a new iPhone application called Celebspotter that provides information on celebrities’ favourite restaurants, bars and clubs as well as entertainment listings. Celebspotter gives the user “the inside track on how to live like a celebrity” according to Alexander Fairfax, managing director of Jeanie Media, the company that has developed the app. The idea is that once you know where your favourite celebrity likes to eat, drink or dance you can bowl along there too in the hope of spotting them.

The information is retrospective so it’s not as if you’d actually be stalking celebrities. That would be way “too controversial”. You can, however, make a good job of spoiling celebrities’ peace of mind. That’s because, disturbingly, the new app also includes a ‘spot the celeb’ function. This sneaky little gizmo enables you to take a picture of your celebrity target and send it straight to OK which may publish it. Presumably the magazine thinks it can create its own swarm of ‘citizen paps’, all intent on capturing celebrities off guard.

Yet I’m not convinced that this will actually work. If I was a celebrity, I would swifly ditch my favourite hangout once I realised Celebspotter had got hold of the address. Unless, of course, I was a minor Z list celebrity in which case I’d be desperately celebspotting myself in order to keep in the public eye.

A genuinely chance encounter and fleeting brush with celebrity is much more exciting than something that is engineered. At least then you can say, “OMG, you’ll never guess who I saw today!” And the sweetest thing is that they really won’t know until you let them into the secret. Isn’t that the whole point?